Committee Politics in the Antebellum Senate

Although the Senate did not have standing committees for its first several decades, the system adopted in the early nineteenth century has endured for over two centuries. Previous research on early Senate committees focuses broadly on their general development and evolution or explores how parties came to control committee politics. While both of these approaches advance our understanding of the Senate’s institutional development, we know comparatively less about which interests were represented on committees. In order to better understand this component of committee politics, I examine how sectional and state-level interests influenced the politics of committee assignments in the antebellum Senate.